This section is intended to provide a background or context. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:
ACF anisotropic conductive film
ALD atomic layer deposition
AR anti-reflective
E2C easy to clean
IMD in-mold decorating
IML in-mold labeling
ITO indium tin oxide
OCA optically clear adhesive
OLED organic light emitting diode
PET polyethylene terephthalate
PUR polyurethane reactive
UE user equipment, such as a mobile station or mobile terminal
UV ultraviolet
Many devices feature glass screen (or windows). While mobile devices are designed in a great many forms, the limitations of glass screens limit the options available. For example, a glass screen which is flat (or two dimensional, 2D) causes the mobile device to present at least that portion of the device as a flat surface. Also, conventional glass screens, especially those that are curved in the front and flat on the backside, tend to be thick (for example, over 1.5 mm). This adds additional weight and size to the mobile device.
While a glass screen may be molded into a three dimensional (3D) shape, this introduces potential hurdles in the manufacturing process. A 3D shape is a non-flat shape where the surface of the shape is not a plane, such as a bent shape or wavy shape for example. A glass screen which is molded, for example, using thermoforming, may have distortions in the glass material. Such a screen is inadequate for many mobile device uses. This also lowers the yield of the molding process as many screens are unusable.
Once an adequate glass screen is molded, there remain additional problems of processing the 3D glass screen. For example, adding a touch-sensor to a 2D glass screen is well understood; however, adding the touch-sensor to a glass screen which includes a curve (or other 3D elements) is not so straight forward. Additionally, current molding techniques for glass screens such as thermoforming make adding functional elements (such as a touch sensor) to the glass screen prior to molding impractical.
What is needed is a technique to make thin 3D glass screens.